First draft - Written for CultureWars.org.uk
Robin Soans hit verbatim gold in 2005 with his edited collection of interviews Talking to Terrorists. It was showing at the Royal Court on 7/7, and what had been relevant drama became urgent, required viewing. Its level-headed compassionate inquiry became a vital corrective to the media hysteria that followed in the aftermath of the bombings. His new play Life After Scandal, perhaps inevitably, lacks any such immediacy and punch.
As the title suggests, the piece looks at the effects on the lives of those who have been vilified in the national press. It is an interesting subject, but the nature of verbatim theatre casts a long shadow over the evening’s proceedings. For a start, the subjects are a self-selecting sample. The piece begins with a barrage of refusals from potential interviewees, all saying that they don’t want to talk on the subject. Others do, of course - at great length in many cases. But what of those who wouldn’t/didn’t? Perhaps as a result of this reticence, or perhaps as a result of Soans’s specific interests, the range here is remarkably narrow - Two disgraced former Tory MPs (three, if you view Edwina Curry as a disgrace), two MP’s wives, four or five hereditary peers, but no Jeffery Archer, and not a single guilty party from a sex-scandal.
At a stroke, the piece stops being so much about Scandal in general and starts looking at the important results of some serious investigative journalism. Granted, elsewhere Lord Brockett pops up, as does Charles “the coughing major” Ingram from Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? But then we’ve already seen these people (Lord Brockett, the Hamiltons, etc.) on television innumerable times since their “scandals” broke, rehabilitating themselves as media-friendly figures of celebrity fun eating jungle insect life at the behest of Ant ‘n’ Dec. The subjects here are those who have made a living from their notoriety.
Beyond this, there is the problem that one only has the subjects’ insights to illuminate the subject. Only if they betray themselves, or cast new and unexpected light on the subject, can the play really take off; which, by and large, those interviewed do not. There are exceptions - Robin Cook’s ex-wife gives a chilling insight into the circumstances of her divorce from the late Foreign Secretary - but mostly what we are offered is a lot of self-pity and anger. All quite understandable, but it feels that in order to get the interviewers to talk, Soans threw nothing but underarm balls while offering tea and sympathy. There is a spark when the words of Guardian journalist David Leigh, who broke the Jonathan Aitken story, are intercut with Aitken’s personal attacks on him and vice versa.
Ironically, one ends up making precisely the sort of judgements that the subjects of the play rail against so vociferously. The Hamiltons come out of it fine, as does Edward Lord Montague; Charles Ingram is understandably angry, if unintentionally hilarious; Lord Brockett is bluff, blokey and fine. Edwina Currie and Margaret Cook are both enormously sympathetic characters, although this may have as much to do with Geraldine Fitzgerald’s portrayal of both, which lends humour and gravity in precisely the right measures. Jonathan Aitken fares less well at the hands of his actor; Philip Bretherton often crosses the boundary from portrayal into pastiche. The potential for Aitken’s words to sound pompous, self-deluding and grandiose is gleefully seized - with the odd result that he comes out of it looking and sounding much more like a louche, self-ironising Alan Clark. David Leigh doesn’t do himself many favours either, preferring to remain vitriolic against Aitken and the Hamiltons, where simple indifference would have looked more humane. Craig Murray, despite being by far the most courageous character on stage, at times runs worryingly close to sounding every inch the paranoid mess that the British establishment paint him as.
The play’s arguments and presentations are a little muddled, and come across more like a mass of source material than a finished product. That said, the acting is consistently engaging throughout and, on a moment to moment basis, the play is never less than interesting. Sadly it never manages to go much beyond this to offer new insights into the nature of scandal, other than to suggest that “the establishment” deliberately use it as a weapon of control to uphold the status quo.
This suggestion is rather punctured by the fact that virtually every scandal-struck interviewee is at least very upper-middle class, if not actually aristocracy, while the press are uniformly presented as cockerney oiks en masse and, when interviewed, are clearly from less privileged backgrounds than their targets - giving the overall impression that all scandal reporting is an elaborate form of class war being waged against our rulers by a bunch of ill-bred, uppity proles. Ultimately, however, despite the interesting subject matter and, no doubt, good intentions, Life After Scandal is too polite to make enough noise to hit any big targets.
Showing posts with label Newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newspapers. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
Monday, 24 September 2007
Lit candles and everything
Sorry it’s been a while. The computers at work have been on the fritz all week with the result that shifts have been rather longer than they’re meant to be, leaving me a bit on the tired side. And since (the utterly, utterly lovely) Natasha Tripney described Postcards as “passionate, humorous and intelligent” in her Guardian blog, I’ve been feeling a bit like I’ve got something to live up to - which is hard to do when news-soaked and sleep-deprived.
Also, what with the Northern Rock farrago taking up every last inch of newsprint and with the blogsophere mostly split between further dissections of A Disappointing Number and the rolling discussion about blogging versus reviewing - both of which I’ve already had a say about - it seemed like as good a time as any to be overtired and under-productive.
WLTM
That said, I did come across what is possibly my favourite ever personals ad in TheLondonPaper on Thursday. No, I’m not looking. But, as literary forms go, the personal ad is hugely underrated - little haiku-like mini-windows onto rolling vistas of desire and despair and all in 160 characters (unless it’s the LRB personals, which are in an altogether different league). What more could a bus journey need? Certainly I’d rather read a page of personal ads than yet another account of a hapless pop moppette having a few too many in one nasty nitespot or other. The ad reads as follows:
“Exotic Asian princess, late 30s, fashionable, vivacious, kind, seeks tall, slim, dark hair/eyes, single, quiet, Catholic man, 38-45, for...”
For a Graham Greene novel, surely?
Actually, what she’s after is “friendship” - if any of you dear readers do happen to fulfil her stringent requirements and want such a chum, her number is 0904 245 0200 with the voicebox 08569. Just don’t come complaining when it turns out that she has been working for the communists all along, and became a nun once she realised that she had fallen in love with you - the man she had been sent to betray.
Nanny State Gone Mad!
Elsewhere in the papers this week, aside from the endless soul-searching over the “first run on an English bank in 148 years,” the police seemed to be getting a good kicking. Mostly over the rather depressing tale of how two community special constable types were instructed by their superiors not to dive into a lake to save two drowning boys because they had not had the necessary training. Having scented blood and established a theme, however, the press do like to expand a one-off into a trend. So it wasn’t especially surprising to see a story about Greater Manchester Police being banned from using bicycles surface in a few papers this morning being paraded as a further example of health and safety regulations Gone Mad ( - a prize of some conkers to the first person to spot a “conkers banned in school” story this year, btw).
That said, the last we heard from the police was their clamour for more firepower. It’s come to something when anyone thinks that a bike is more dangerous than a gun.
Celebrity Love Lost
While we’re here, I should also put in a quick plug for the discussion that I’m producing and appearing in at the Finborough Theatre tonight. It is on the subject of “celebrity casting” in theatre. It starts at half seven. If you happen to read this in time, do come along if you’re not busy. No doubt a more detailed post on the subject will appear tomorrow.
Readin’
Aside from some lovely new stuff from the usual suspects in the blogosphere (names listed to your right), a couple of arts pieces did catch my attention over the weekend:
In a recent Financial Times, Clement Crisp’s review of Tango Fire is worth a read if you’re interested in critical writing. I hardly ever remember to read dance reviews properly - partially because the prose style of the ones I’m more usually exposed to isn’t really my bag - but this struck me as fascinating. Obviously I’ve no idea how likely he is to be right, or even whether its accurate - but it's great to read engagement with a largely separate artform being conducted in a different idiom. It makes me keen to read up on the debates that surround dance criticism, and see if they compare, or if there are lessons to be learned.
Also on the subject of critical pursuits, Mark Kermode’s piece for the Observer about his battle to overcome his film-centric ignorance of television is something to which I intend to return when I have time to read it properly - interesting to note, in passing, that he refers to the recent Nick Hytner/theatre critics rumpus. Obviously even those without a vested interest were taking notes.
And finally, anyone with a taste for the sublime and ridiculous should immediately read this remarkable interview with 17-year-old actor Nicholas Hoult off of Skins talking with great enthusiasm and frankness about his obsession with Nando’s:
"I do romantic meals with my girlfriend. Lit candles and everything. But I take her to Nando's too. She knows that I'm obsessed with it, and she's pretty understanding about going there for dinner."
Also, what with the Northern Rock farrago taking up every last inch of newsprint and with the blogsophere mostly split between further dissections of A Disappointing Number and the rolling discussion about blogging versus reviewing - both of which I’ve already had a say about - it seemed like as good a time as any to be overtired and under-productive.
WLTM
That said, I did come across what is possibly my favourite ever personals ad in TheLondonPaper on Thursday. No, I’m not looking. But, as literary forms go, the personal ad is hugely underrated - little haiku-like mini-windows onto rolling vistas of desire and despair and all in 160 characters (unless it’s the LRB personals, which are in an altogether different league). What more could a bus journey need? Certainly I’d rather read a page of personal ads than yet another account of a hapless pop moppette having a few too many in one nasty nitespot or other. The ad reads as follows:
“Exotic Asian princess, late 30s, fashionable, vivacious, kind, seeks tall, slim, dark hair/eyes, single, quiet, Catholic man, 38-45, for...”
For a Graham Greene novel, surely?
Actually, what she’s after is “friendship” - if any of you dear readers do happen to fulfil her stringent requirements and want such a chum, her number is 0904 245 0200 with the voicebox 08569. Just don’t come complaining when it turns out that she has been working for the communists all along, and became a nun once she realised that she had fallen in love with you - the man she had been sent to betray.
Nanny State Gone Mad!
Elsewhere in the papers this week, aside from the endless soul-searching over the “first run on an English bank in 148 years,” the police seemed to be getting a good kicking. Mostly over the rather depressing tale of how two community special constable types were instructed by their superiors not to dive into a lake to save two drowning boys because they had not had the necessary training. Having scented blood and established a theme, however, the press do like to expand a one-off into a trend. So it wasn’t especially surprising to see a story about Greater Manchester Police being banned from using bicycles surface in a few papers this morning being paraded as a further example of health and safety regulations Gone Mad ( - a prize of some conkers to the first person to spot a “conkers banned in school” story this year, btw).
That said, the last we heard from the police was their clamour for more firepower. It’s come to something when anyone thinks that a bike is more dangerous than a gun.
Celebrity Love Lost
While we’re here, I should also put in a quick plug for the discussion that I’m producing and appearing in at the Finborough Theatre tonight. It is on the subject of “celebrity casting” in theatre. It starts at half seven. If you happen to read this in time, do come along if you’re not busy. No doubt a more detailed post on the subject will appear tomorrow.
Readin’
Aside from some lovely new stuff from the usual suspects in the blogosphere (names listed to your right), a couple of arts pieces did catch my attention over the weekend:
In a recent Financial Times, Clement Crisp’s review of Tango Fire is worth a read if you’re interested in critical writing. I hardly ever remember to read dance reviews properly - partially because the prose style of the ones I’m more usually exposed to isn’t really my bag - but this struck me as fascinating. Obviously I’ve no idea how likely he is to be right, or even whether its accurate - but it's great to read engagement with a largely separate artform being conducted in a different idiom. It makes me keen to read up on the debates that surround dance criticism, and see if they compare, or if there are lessons to be learned.
Also on the subject of critical pursuits, Mark Kermode’s piece for the Observer about his battle to overcome his film-centric ignorance of television is something to which I intend to return when I have time to read it properly - interesting to note, in passing, that he refers to the recent Nick Hytner/theatre critics rumpus. Obviously even those without a vested interest were taking notes.
And finally, anyone with a taste for the sublime and ridiculous should immediately read this remarkable interview with 17-year-old actor Nicholas Hoult off of Skins talking with great enthusiasm and frankness about his obsession with Nando’s:
"I do romantic meals with my girlfriend. Lit candles and everything. But I take her to Nando's too. She knows that I'm obsessed with it, and she's pretty understanding about going there for dinner."
Monday, 13 August 2007
Pre-Edinburgh preamble
Yesterday I suffered a sudden pang of professional jealousy. I was reading Hermione Eyre’s TV criticism column in the Independent on Sunday (I would put a link, but the Independent’s effing website is unnavigable). It's not that I want her job, or even the theatre reviewing gig at the Sindie. No, my pang was this: in writing about the Channel 4 documentary Malcolm & Barbara: Love's Farewell, Hermione was essentially fulfilling the role of critic as social commentator - of reviews as a location of serious, intelligent discussion on an issue of national import. My pang wasn’t so much on my behalf as on the part theatre criticism.
Theatre criticism simply never gets to act in the same way, because it is close to the opposite of a post-fact TV review - rather than offering an intelligent take on something that your readers have already seen in the same time week as you, you are forever describing something that, at most, a couple of thousand people might have seen before the review is published and maybe a few thousand more will see subsequently. Frequently the numbers are far, far lower - consider the 700 people who saw Harold Pinter’s Krapp last year. On top of this, there is nothing like the same level of national interest.
What was also striking, reading the review of Love's Farewell, was that it was the culmination of a week or so when the programme had dominated the news - at least in the soft news and comment sections. It also tapped a zeitgeist - this was also the week when the Court of Appeal upheld the decision by the National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence (still unfathomably acronymed as NICE) not to recommend NHS prescription of various Alzheimer’s treatments to early-stage sufferers of the disease.
Now, there are a number of good reasons why theatre criticism doesn’t do this. Not least because theatre is - quite rightly - very rarely a documentary: it is art, or at least entertainment. Theatre isn’t usually journalism. Nonetheless, I do still sort of wish that my field wasn’t so frequently reminded of its supreme irrelevance.
Anyway, that was the upside of my reading the last week's press. The rest of it was largely dispiriting. There are times, especially when confronted with the seething pile that is the Sundays, that the future of this country looks very black indeed. If, as Mark Twain famously observed, a newspaper is the sound of a country talking to itself then much of Britain's national conversation seems to be conducted in an ignorant hysterical shrieking. It is also interesting to note that all too frequently these hysterics on the part of the media are actually about the media. This is the sound of a lunatic shrieking to itself about itself. If you get enough buses, you’ll know exactly how disturbing this is.
I should point out that this concern is largely prompted by the fact that due to the peculiarities of my job. I have to read a large proportion of everything published in the country’s newspapers in seven-day blocks every other week. While a lot of the papers are just reasonably unpleasant on an individual level, when taken en masse they start to look deeply troubling. The thing is that no one sane ever has to do this. Newspaper articles aren’t intended to be read in eleven different versions, and I can thoroughly recommend you don’t start doing so. That said, it is instructive on any given story to work one’s way down from the Financial Times (it really must be news if it’s made it into the FT) through what were "the broadsheets", where most of what varies is slant, through the Independent, Mail and Express, where the numbers and facts start getting a bit less similar to those reported uniformly hitherto (they don’t make it up per se, they just find slightly more dramatic ways of extrapolating information - usually by projecting a ten-year worst-case-scenario trend). Then you get to the tabloids, where the main object is packing the greatest level of possible sensation into a headline - often in tabloid code (perv, feral kid, migrant, tot, yob, thug, sir, caged, monster, so sad etc.) and sometimes at the expense of sense. The best example this week was the legend: 23 years for Skunk Monster - which, as it happens, this was a grim story about drug addled child torture and murder, but one whose headline irresistibly conjured images of a giant Pepé le Peu menacing the metropolis.
I’m sure there was a conclusion I was trying to reach by this point, but it has temporarily escaped me. I shall fill it in if and when I remember what it is.
In other news - My two reviews (left and right, as I’ve started to think of them) of Richard Bean’s excellent In the Club at the Hampstead Theatre are now up on CultureWars and the New Culture Forum website. One day I might have to write about the strange state of affairs that finds me writing theatre reviews almost exclusively for two of the most polarised cultural think tanks around. For the moment I shall just be grateful for the work.
Elsewhere, if you haven't already had a chance to look at my Michael Billington NSDF piece for the Times online it is worth do so if only to giggle at just how wrong a picture editor can be
Finally, it is tempting to leave you with a whole playlist of YouTube videos - it really is a terribly useful way of linking to music online, albeit with the frequently irritating fact that the videos attached frequently do the songs no favours (see below, and listen while working in another window). However, it really slows uploading the pages at this end, so I'll spare you the politically dubious delights of the quasi-Nazi band Death in June singing a song from the apparent perspective of Waffen SS soldiers called We Drive East that's been stuck in my head for the last couple of days, and instead offer you Annie Lennox doing Keep Young and Beautiful - I would have linked to the original, but it's Eddie Cantor in blackface, and I'm not sure Postcards wants to support that kind of thing.
Theatre criticism simply never gets to act in the same way, because it is close to the opposite of a post-fact TV review - rather than offering an intelligent take on something that your readers have already seen in the same time week as you, you are forever describing something that, at most, a couple of thousand people might have seen before the review is published and maybe a few thousand more will see subsequently. Frequently the numbers are far, far lower - consider the 700 people who saw Harold Pinter’s Krapp last year. On top of this, there is nothing like the same level of national interest.
What was also striking, reading the review of Love's Farewell, was that it was the culmination of a week or so when the programme had dominated the news - at least in the soft news and comment sections. It also tapped a zeitgeist - this was also the week when the Court of Appeal upheld the decision by the National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence (still unfathomably acronymed as NICE) not to recommend NHS prescription of various Alzheimer’s treatments to early-stage sufferers of the disease.
Now, there are a number of good reasons why theatre criticism doesn’t do this. Not least because theatre is - quite rightly - very rarely a documentary: it is art, or at least entertainment. Theatre isn’t usually journalism. Nonetheless, I do still sort of wish that my field wasn’t so frequently reminded of its supreme irrelevance.
Anyway, that was the upside of my reading the last week's press. The rest of it was largely dispiriting. There are times, especially when confronted with the seething pile that is the Sundays, that the future of this country looks very black indeed. If, as Mark Twain famously observed, a newspaper is the sound of a country talking to itself then much of Britain's national conversation seems to be conducted in an ignorant hysterical shrieking. It is also interesting to note that all too frequently these hysterics on the part of the media are actually about the media. This is the sound of a lunatic shrieking to itself about itself. If you get enough buses, you’ll know exactly how disturbing this is.
I should point out that this concern is largely prompted by the fact that due to the peculiarities of my job. I have to read a large proportion of everything published in the country’s newspapers in seven-day blocks every other week. While a lot of the papers are just reasonably unpleasant on an individual level, when taken en masse they start to look deeply troubling. The thing is that no one sane ever has to do this. Newspaper articles aren’t intended to be read in eleven different versions, and I can thoroughly recommend you don’t start doing so. That said, it is instructive on any given story to work one’s way down from the Financial Times (it really must be news if it’s made it into the FT) through what were "the broadsheets", where most of what varies is slant, through the Independent, Mail and Express, where the numbers and facts start getting a bit less similar to those reported uniformly hitherto (they don’t make it up per se, they just find slightly more dramatic ways of extrapolating information - usually by projecting a ten-year worst-case-scenario trend). Then you get to the tabloids, where the main object is packing the greatest level of possible sensation into a headline - often in tabloid code (perv, feral kid, migrant, tot, yob, thug, sir, caged, monster, so sad etc.) and sometimes at the expense of sense. The best example this week was the legend: 23 years for Skunk Monster - which, as it happens, this was a grim story about drug addled child torture and murder, but one whose headline irresistibly conjured images of a giant Pepé le Peu menacing the metropolis.
I’m sure there was a conclusion I was trying to reach by this point, but it has temporarily escaped me. I shall fill it in if and when I remember what it is.
In other news - My two reviews (left and right, as I’ve started to think of them) of Richard Bean’s excellent In the Club at the Hampstead Theatre are now up on CultureWars and the New Culture Forum website. One day I might have to write about the strange state of affairs that finds me writing theatre reviews almost exclusively for two of the most polarised cultural think tanks around. For the moment I shall just be grateful for the work.
Elsewhere, if you haven't already had a chance to look at my Michael Billington NSDF piece for the Times online it is worth do so if only to giggle at just how wrong a picture editor can be
Finally, it is tempting to leave you with a whole playlist of YouTube videos - it really is a terribly useful way of linking to music online, albeit with the frequently irritating fact that the videos attached frequently do the songs no favours (see below, and listen while working in another window). However, it really slows uploading the pages at this end, so I'll spare you the politically dubious delights of the quasi-Nazi band Death in June singing a song from the apparent perspective of Waffen SS soldiers called We Drive East that's been stuck in my head for the last couple of days, and instead offer you Annie Lennox doing Keep Young and Beautiful - I would have linked to the original, but it's Eddie Cantor in blackface, and I'm not sure Postcards wants to support that kind of thing.
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